DimP, a direct manipulation video player, lets users drag items on the video screen to move forward and back instead of just via a scroll bar on the bottom of the video. This is not only more fun, but it also allows users to scroll through video to where they want to be “at least two times faster,” In a paper presented by Pierre Dragicevic, Gonzalo Ramos, Jacobo Bibliowicz, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Ravin Balakrishnan, Karan Singh from the University of Toronto, the authors present their method for browsing video by directly dragging content by “1) automatically extracting motion data from videos; and 2) a new technique called relative flow dragging that lets users control video playback by moving objects of interest along their visual trajectory.”

Whatever that means, one thing’s for certain. At least some of these guys are going to be getting job offers from Adobe. Their paper and another video demonstration is below. Thanks for the tip Brian.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/wrapper.ashx?doc_id=615949&swf_url=http%3A//content1.docstoc.com.s3.amazonaws.com/Video+Browsing+by+Direct+Manipulation.pdf.swf&showrelated=0&showstats=0&enableFullScreen=1
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